Magic and the Muse by Annie Crawford

Best day yet, continued

I’m a bit nervous about meeting a wild boar face to face, but the forest road doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, so we decide to take our chances and go through the gate, closing it carefully behind us. After a couple hundred meters we come upon the most beautiful and perfect little stone house you can imagine.

Perfect.

It has a little terraced garden in front going down the hillside, and a breathtaking panoramic view.

The view from these lucky people's front yard

I don’t know if the owner rents it out, but this is definitely where I want to stay next time I come to Cinque Terre!! We don’t run into any cinghiali, luckily.

We continue along the path and eventually come out of the forest onto a narrow ridgeline. Vineyards descend the sheer slopes on either side of us.

It's really steep!

Mr. Toad's wild monorail

Here we encounter two workers, the first people we’ve seen all day. They look at us in amazement as if we’ve just dropped out of the sky. We ask for directions back to Manarola.

Just in case the workers get tired.

The path they send us on is obviously used by vineyard workers, not tourists. It’s the narrowest and steepest yet, with little flights of high steep stone steps only about 6 inches wide in places.

Corniglia below us

We place our feet with care, but even so, I fall off the path into a bramble of wild roses and get all scratched up, and Rick has to haul me out. The amazing views and the solitude make all my cuts and bruises worth it, though.

Now we’re back in our cheerless rooms in Vernazza, fortified with gelato. In addition to the never-ending din rising from the party-crazed tourists below, there’s another sound now, the crashing and pounding of the surf on the rocks just outside the harbor. We read in Rick Steve’s book that the surf can get very high here, and that you have to be careful because you can actually get swept out to sea. Apparently this happened to some poor woman tourist while he was here—she was dragged out to sea and drowned. An unfortunate end to her vacation! None of this is bothering me right now, though. I’m still on a high from the lovely, perfect walk we’ve just taken. This is the best day I’ve spent in Italy so far!

Best day yet!!

The sky is a pearly gray, the breeze is cool and damp, and we’re setting out on a six-mile hike up the mountainside.

Rain? No problem!

It begins to rain just as we’re leaving Manarola, but we’re undeterred–we pass a small open-air store and buy a couple of ponchos. Fortunately the rain doesn’t last long.

Perfect weather for a hike!

For the first few miles, the path winds steeply upward through the cultivated terrain we’ve already seen on our previous hikes, a patchwork quilt of small farms, vineyards and fruit orchards, bordered by a profusion of wildflowers in every possible color.

Beautiful old doors

We pass farm outbuildings made of weathered stone, old wooden doors studded with medieval-looking iron fixtures set deep into their walls. Even more refreshing than the cool breeze is the solitary state of the path—we don’t run into a single person. We pass through Volastra, a charming little town about two-thirds of the way up the mountainside, and ask for directions.

Volastra's little pastel church

The storekeeper shakes her head disapprovingly and tells us the weather’s not good, and we should head down to Corniglia, but we’re from Washington. A little rain won’t bother us! On the road above Volastra we come to a path marked by a little sign advising walkers not to take it because it’s “not practical.” We take it nonetheless and soon find out why: it quickly dwindles to a tiny track barely wide enough to walk on.

This is a path??

Our legs are getting scratched up from pushing our way through thistles and wild rose brambles, and we have to stoop to avoid the tree branches overhanging the path. We’re hot and dusty and I have a bump developing on my forehead from smacking it against a branch when we finally come out onto a narrow road, overgrown and obviously in disuse.

We’ve climbed above the little farms by this point, and we’re in a pine forest. It’s cool and fragrant and perfectly quiet except for the birds singing in the trees.

Manarola (or is it Corniglia?) seen from the forest path

As we wander along, (with no idea where we’re going) we notice there’s an electric fence running along both sides of the road. We’re wondering why, since it’s dense forest and there are no houses or cultivated fields anywhere around. Rick speculates that it’s to keep people from hiking cross-country, but that doesn’t really make sense because the hillside on both sides of the trail is so steep, it would be very difficult to hike across it without a trail. After a couple of miles, we reach a turnoff with a gate. There’s a sign saying “This is a public path, but please be sure to close the gate behind you so the cinghiali don’t get onto the road.” Okay, now we know what the electric fence is for!